I have set up the multimedia repositories, downloaded and installed all the codecs and libraries that are, or should be, necessary to play multimedia in linux.But I cannot play .wav files. Amarok plays everything else, including mp3, ogg, flac, but will not play .wav.

As an example, VLC throws up this error when I select it to play a .wav file

File reading failed:VLC could not open the file "/usr/share/sounds/ir_begin.wav". (Permission denied)Your input can't be opened:VLC is unable to open the MRL 'file:///usr/share/sounds/ir_begin.wav'. Check the log for details.

I'm now going to try and find that 'log' as VLC doesn't tell you where it is located.

I've searched in apper and synaptic for "codecs", "wav", anything that I can think of that may relate to this.

Does anyone here have an idea?

"I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

I can't find the VLC log file, but I have installed Audacious. When I try play a wav file in that I getCannot open /usr/share/sounds/chimes.wav: Permission denied.No decoder found for file:///usr/share/sounds/chimes.wav.This is getting annoying. I'm wasting so much time just trying to play a simple wav file. This is, I fear, going to be the final straw. I've spent so much time over the last week fixing little issues here and there just to get basic stuff working that I am on the verge of wiping my linux hdd and going back to using my Win 7 install again.I haven't used linux for about four years and was expecting improvements. If anything it's worse, everything is so fragmented. People moaning about Unity, Gnome 3, forking Gnome 2, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE bloat, it goes on and onThis is 2012, it feels more difficult than it did in 2002. It certainly doesn't have the community feel it did back then.Sorry for the rant but I really think I can't waste any more time. Bye linux, and I am genuinely sorry to have to say that but it really is the end of the line as far as I'm concerned.

"I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."

Bye linux, and I am genuinely sorry to have to say that but it really is the end of the line as far as I'm concerned.

If you want help you will get very good help here. If you want to complain and make threats to go back to Windows no one will bother to answer. There are sheep and shepherds and also free men like myself. I care little about the former.

Playing wav files has nothing to do with Linux save alsa drivers. About that you mention other sound files working. Here is my default "aptitude install vlc" of vlc playing a wav file. So I am wondering what the user error is here.

Permissions denied sounds iffy. I am going to looking into what library alsa uses to play wav files and perhaps you need to reinstall it. Could you run any number of players in the terminal and see what the output is? Obviously this is unusual.

When you get a "Permission denied" error, you should stop thinking about codecs and start thinking about permission problems. I see you are trying to play a system file as a local user. Can you copy the wav file from its location in /usr to somewhere in your home directory and see if VLC can play it then? Maybe

su -c 'vlc <wav file name in system folder>'

would also point to permissions--maybe your local user does not have the rights to open system sound files?

It would be nice if someone could say where the VLC logs are located. It should provide some info that might help troubleshooting. I would be interested in where they're located as I received a similar message needing to check the log when my wav files wouldn't play.

Shouldn't he check the /etc/fstab for his optical drive device (CD/DVD drive)? Or?

Edit: to make sure permissions isn't an issue, I would check /etc/fstab for your optical drive info. That is, seeing what device node it's being assigned. For e.g., I discovered this one for mine: /dev/scd0.

Maybe someone can explain what this means? I'm reading about it now. The 'l' shows the file type is a link and then the permissions are listed and I thought maybe the link is a symlink or something that is pointing to 'sr0?' Not sure what that part is about.

The older VLC has tons of bugs and the people who develop Videolan/VLC don't seem to care about Debian or AMD64 systems (these are Ubuntu and OpenSUSE users, apparently) so it's more than just the multimedia repo.

Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a good way for integrating, that is, for upgrading VLC so you can use it in Squeeze. There's a lot of older posts and forum threads about similar problems if you google.

I wasted a lot of time on this and I'm tired of doing so.

As you can tell, a lot of orginal posters end up disappearing because they probably gave up. VLC has a website showing installs for Linux but they don't care to update it so the stupid user will consequently discover numerous problems when they try to install unless they are using a particular distro or have the updated/upgraded packages already.

BUT--you will need to have the official squeeze-backports repo enabled to install some newer build-depends. The MEPIS debs may install into Squeeze with the backports repo enabled--it depends on how new a libx264 you can get.